Tag: Nuclear Waste

A key business leader has lashed out at a government plan to construct an interim storage facility for radioactive waste in Fukushima Prefecture, site of an ongoing nuclear crisis, rather than in Tokyo.

Toshio Seya, a former banker and head of the Fukushima Chamber of Commerce and Industry, asked during a regular news conference on Aug. 30: "Why doesn’t the government build (the proposed facility to store radioactive waste) in Tokyo’s Odaiba district? After all, the beneficiary of nuclear power is Tokyo."

Seya was clearly caught off-guard by the decision made by the Kan administration in its waning days.

Japanese authorities are nearing a decision to release radioactive steam from a troubled nuclear reactor, industry minister Benri Kaieda said Saturday.Kaieda was referring to the rising pressure inside the No. 1 reactor of the Fukushima No. 1 plant, which was hit by a powerful earthquake Friday.

Japanese Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa on Friday ordered the Self-Defense Forces to act in response to the state of atomic power emergency declared following a powerful earthquake.

The SDF will send aircraft on a fact-finding mission near the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant as some 3,000 residents nearby have been ordered to evacuate due to a problem with a cooling system detected at one of its reactors.

The first delivery of at least 850 canisters of high-level radioactive vitrified waste arrived Tuesday morning by ship from the U.K. in Rokkasho, Aomori Prefecture, where it will sit in storage for decades before being buried deep underground. Antinuclear activists argue that with no local government yet willing to host a final disposal site and concern over the international security and environmental risks of transporting so much nuclear waste between the U.K. and Japan, the shipments should end.